Little Inferno Review

I wonder how the meeting for this game went. We will have a player sit near a little fireplace and the only gameplay loop would consist of throwing stuff in fireplace and burning it. It is one of those games which sound terrible on paper, but are better in reality.

 

        Personality

• The thing which makes or breaks such games is if it is enjoyable to play them. As there isn’t much that game could offer to a player, it has to have very enticing gameplay. What is here was quite well polished up. Writing is funny, animations are great. Stuff which you burn are full of personality. To break the monotony you can chain several items, sometimes they have an unique effects when chained together. It takes some time to correctly guess a combo, but it is an enjoyable little distraction. Game is full of charm and personality which makes concept work.
  
  Its own niche
• This is a game meant to relaxation, to be played in short bursts. It puts no pressure upon player as you always are getting more money and progressing. You have no arbitrary timers or some criteria to meet. This creates a relaxed atmosphere where you are left to do whatever you want like you would be playing a sandbox type game. It is not a game where you can expect failures states, it is more of those trucker type games. You sit and relax doing very non-demanding activities.

While developers boasted that this game is polished to perfection, it is not true. This game still lacks three important parts.

1. Entire combo system is flawed. If you want to complete it under realistic time span, you will be looking at wiki for all the combinations. Some combinations you can guess from name alone, however most of them are just pure trial and error. Fan made wiki has an amazing system which does not just tell you a combination, but gives either one of several hints or you can go straight to answer. This game desperately needs such system here. On every challenge, game needs you to give 3 hints. You could press on it to reveal one hint, maybe for symbolic sum of money. In this way, combos could be beatable in game without being forced into trial and error scenarios all the time where it is impossible to figure out the correct combination.
   
   
2. Game lacks some special animations for combos. In addition, quality of burning animations differs widely from an item to item. A lot of combos do not even have unique animations and some items have very underwhelming or no animations when being burned. Polished to perfection my a’s’s.
   
   
3. Game has an incomprehensible story. It is a little bit of storytelling which goes nowhere. I like the dark twist on the end which just few people would notice. Owner of Little Inferno company goes mad and flies into space to die while our player character goes with a strange man who says he will molest him for taking him in. His friend, girl next door also burns her house down and is kidnapped while kidnappers write fake letter to you that she is fine. Story does not tell much than that, it goes around and round, being mysterious and having no actual development. In such a game, I would expect little more being revealed about the world as you play on.

It is a good, fun game. Perfect when you want to relax and do not want to play a game which never ends. You can take things at a pace you like and do what you want while still progressing through the game. I play such games sometimes to get a relief from those big triple A games. Sometimes it just gets tiring to play a game where you need 50+ hours invested just in hopes to complete a single campaign. Such cute little games are nice change of pace.